SLAC Helps NASA Develop Printable Electronics for Mars Mission

This computer-generated image depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Plans begin decades in advance for a tremendous effort such as the first manned mission to Mars. The details are as fine – and essential – as how astronauts will breathe and eat and track their health.

“There’s no doubt that the transportation is taken care of. The spacecraft will be developed,” says Ram Gandhiraman, a scientist with Universities Space Research Association at NASA Ames Research Center. “But how are you going to sustain astronauts for one year or more? Equipment wears out, and supplies need replenished. This is work that also needs to be done.”

To help prepare for the endeavor, Gandhiraman is creating a tool that will allow astronauts to craft materials in space using a jet of plasma – an energized gas of free electrons and ions. (Plasma is the fourth state of matter, joining the more familiar solid, liquid and gas.)

The plasma jet can spray tiny semiconductor particles onto cheap, flexible surfaces, such as paper or cloth, and form wearable electronic circuits. Astronauts can use these sensors to track their health and also the environment. The sensors contain small semiconductors tailored to detect biomolecules, such as dopamine and serotonin, as well as gases like ammonia in the environment.

The NASA team brings the sensors to SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, to look at the fine details of the sensors’ surfaces. This characterization allows them to optimize the process for printing sensors with the same quality every time.

Developing the Printer

The scientists need to be able to tailor the materials traveling through the plasma and control how they deposit on a surface. Even small defects can make the sensors nonfunctional.

“This is where X-ray spectroscopy is crucial,” Gandhiraman says. Every other month or so, Gandhiraman and his team would analyze sensors at SSRL. While developing the plasma printer, Ram worked closely with SLAC scientist Dennis Nordlund to characterize the newly printed sensors.

“These techniques allow us to see what chemical groups are present at the surface of the fabricated sensors,” Nordlund says. “This allows us to extract information about the material on an element-by-element basis, including the part of the chemical structure responsible for reactivity and the content of graphitic carbon – an important form of carbon that conducts well – present in the samples.”

This helped solve one of Gandhiraman’s major challenges – printing exact copies at such a fine scale.

“Say we ramp up the voltage or the flow of the plasma jet, then you get different chemistries that result in loss of device performance or sensitivity. What causes the behavior was not clear,” Gandhiraman says. “We needed to go back and forth and do an analysis on materials that we print. We used that information about surface properties to optimize the process here.”

The plasma-printed nanomaterial forms a dense network of sensor and signal amplification materials better than other printing methods, including screen or aerosol printing. Another advantage: Plasma printing can operate at low temperatures, which means the paper or cloth is not destroyed during the process.